Tera Productions proudly announces the release of our new music video for Pocono Mountain Harley-Davidson. This 4:48 video is culmination of the generous efforts and talents of Robert Provitera and the fine staff and owners of Pocono Mountain Harley-Davidson. If you have any questions or comments or you are interested in having your own music video, please contact us through our website.
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Robert K. Ace Construction has hired ExpressWrite and partners to expand its service area and reach out to new potential customers for all its high quality construction services including roofing, siding, new construction, renovation, kitchens and baths. About RKA: Choosing to build a home is one of the most important decisions you’ll make, and for […]
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Watch this great new video produced by Tera Productions for Pocono Mountain Harley-Davidson, entirely written and produced by Robert Provitera.
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You probably found us through google if you weren’t referred to us by someone you know. That is how we at Vintage Pro Painting get many calls. Our reviews in google. A contractor that we can recommend with equally high ratings is Robert Ace Construction specializing in Custom Homes, Roofing, Additions, Windows, Siding and Decks.
If you’re planning to build a new custom home or to renovate your existing home, please do yourself the favor of choosing the best builder to do the best job. Take a look at the testimonies on the website of http://rkaconstruction.com/ or in google and see for yourself their proven track record of building quality custom homes for over a decade in the Poconos which meet and exceed discerning customers’ expectations. You deserve the very best home and RKA knows how to provide that for you at the highest return on your invested dollars and your invested time. Robert Ace makes your home building project their highest priority.
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We’ve noticed a disturbing trend of amateurs and newbies who purport to be SEO professionals lately. I’m always trying to keep up with the trends and learn more, so I’m often on/in webinars, seminars, and conferences where there are people selling search engine optimization courses directly to these inexperienced people. The line is, SEO is easy. We’ll show you how to do it in a few days and you can sell your services for thousands of dollars immediately. Because of this, there are a lot of people out there, who say they do SEO, but in truth have no idea what they’re doing.
What I’m seeing more and more of these days is the following. In reality, the newbies who just bought someone else’s SEO course and learned how to manipulate Google for the time being, may well have just started doing SEO yesterday, or in the last few weeks or months. So when Google updates their algorithm to stop people from trying to easily game the system and spamming the results, these so called professionals have no idea how to fix suddenly lost rankings. In short the client get penalized and loses their rankings.
If you don’t have the money to hire a real Search Engine Optimization professional, do yourself a favor and try something else, because in the long run it’s going to hurt you and cost you much more money to fix the mess. We talk to people on a regular basis who have tried other so called SEO professionals, and have spent many hundreds or thousands of dollars for no results, or very short lived results. Then it costs them even more to fix the problem and clean up the mess and penalties that prevent the site from ever ranking well in the future.
If you’re in need of experienced optimization and website marketing, give me a call at 570-269-5130.
www.1stseoweb.com – Real Results, No Sales Fluff
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RKA Construction takes great pride in building the very best custom luxury homes. They have a reputation which proves their commitment to doing high quality work with integrity and attention to detail. Most importantly, they communicate and partner with clients to make sure every desire is manifested in the clients dream home come true. See how they can meet your building needs and exceed your expectations. Check out http://rkaconstruction.com/ .
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Loving the Thai food lately. Going out to dinner, occasionally with Dad in NY or locally in the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos. The curry is great. Healthy and such wonderful flavor.
Check out the awesome carvings at Saen Thai over by Shawnee. They have them on the walls and in the tables under glass.
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An old black and white film of Kennywood Park shows some of their early thrill rides. One is a giant spinner, like a record turntable but large enough for a couple dozen people to sit on. It is completely smooth with nothing to hold onto except for the spindle in the very center. I guess the idea is to try to stay on as long as possible as it begins to spin faster and faster.
The ride at Kennywood was built in a time before seatbelts in cars, an era when kids would ride their bikes and scooters up and down freshly cindered streets with no helmets or knee pads or worried parents hovering over every wobble or tumble. Parents cared of course. They loved their children. Our parents loved us. They patched up our scrapes and cuts, held cold wash cloths to our heads and dried our tears. They let us find out that some things hurt when you do them. Sometimes you fall down. Sometimes you fall off and it hurts. The person who designed the spinner at Kennywood must have been a mom or dad who looked at their kids one day and thought it would be such fun to build them a giant smooth spinning disc to ride on with nothing to hold onto except that one post in the center. As it began to spin faster and faster the children would slide off the slick surface into the waiting arms of moms and dads in a time when moms and dads did wait patiently at the edges with cold wash clothes and band-aids and tincture of iodine. The science of centrifugal force causes objects to fly away from the center, towards whomever or whatever is on the edges, on the outside. The designer must have known that centrifuges also separate and sort things out. Centrifuges separate red blood cells from white blood cells, solids from liquids, Uranium 238 from Uranium 235. They can be used to simulate weightlessness for training astronauts and simulating extreme maneuvers for fighter pilots. Or an amusement ride for kids.
A group of college kids is at the amusement park dressed as though they have just come from a dance, boys in suits and ties, girls in fluffy prom dresses with lots of mysterious and impenetrable layers of chiffon. At dances they have cards with numbers followed by blank spaces for each of the dances and you have to fill in a girl’s name in every space. You have to. You don’t want to have a blank space, no partner for a dance because then you have to stand alone on the side and not put your hands in your pockets while everyone else dances and they all can see you don’t have a partner. Maybe you can’t get a partner. Maybe all the girls say “no.” And the hard part for the girls there are always more girls than boys. They try to keep the numbers equal so no one gets left out, so everyone has a partner but it never works out that way. Sometimes even when you start out with pairs, like socks, you still end up with one or two that don’t match any others so you just tuck them in the side of the drawer and hope someday the mate will show up. It rarely does, but you don’t want to throw it away. You wait and hope. So, you don’t want to be the one standing on the side with nothing to hold onto but your dance card with a blank space on it.
Some of the college kids, mostly the girls in their puffy formal gowns, sit along the outer edge of the spinner, ready to jump off when it begins to rotate. When it does, they land lightly on their feet, dismounting with pointed toe as though from a royal carriage, smiling, smoothing their dresses, looking back at those still sitting on the spinning disc. It is enough for them to say they had ridden the spinner, had a little thrill, not too risky, not too fast. They know it is good to land on your feet even if the ride is short. They know it is better to be safe than sorry. Falling down hurts. Others sit further up the disc, mostly the boys. A few adventurous girls peer out above little chiffon mounds with legs stretched out in front, trying to stay balanced while holding down their dresses so boys can’t see their panties. Boys are always trying to see their panties, another thrill of the ride for the boys. As the spinner winds up, they start to slide. Not straight the way their feet are pointed but sideways too. Centrifugal force is like that. It’s not straight ahead. It bends. Engineers know that. Scientists know that. And so they fall sideways and slide out towards the edge, some laughing, arms and legs flying, some holding hands, some holding dresses. They come off the ride much faster and with less grace, stumbling to catch their footing. Sometimes an outstretched hand steadies them, sometimes not. Sometimes they just bump into the people on the edges. One or two go to their knees, but get up right away. They smile and laugh with the outsiders assuring each other that it’s ok. Yeah, that was fun. Gee whiz! Suits are straightened, dresses patted back into place as they glance back at the remaining riders.
The platter spins even faster so only a few are still left near the center. A boy and girl cling to the center post. But the designer made this ride so you can’t hold on even when you climb all the way to the center. It won’t stop spinning until the ride is over and no one is left, so it just spins faster and faster. You can climb to the center or near the center but once you start to slip there is no going back. Flail and claw and kick. A boy reaches out to rescue a girl and she just drags him outward with her, both of them tumbling to the edge. The longer you hold on, the faster it goes and the harder you slam into those gathered along the rim. The higher you climb and the further you slide, the more centrifugal force. It’s just science. It’s just physics, the way the universe works. So, now the kids are coming off the spinner fast, like the fighter pilots must feel when their airplanes loop in the sky, flying out with great force and speed. But they don’t land on their feet anymore. They land roughly, awkwardly, falling. People try to catch them but it’s too much. Their faces look surprised, eyes wide. They had to know it would come to this. Didn’t they watch what happened to others before them? Why are they surprised? No one stays on the spinner till the end of the ride. The designer made it like that.
The last one on the spinner is a young man, holding on with all his strength as though he had to prove something, maybe to himself, maybe to his friends. Both hands wrapped around the center post. He glances over his shoulder and sees he’s the only one left. Maybe he thinks about a blank space on his dance card. Maybe is remembering gripping the handlebars with cinders flying out from beneath the wheels of his bicycle. His jaw seems to relax a bit, perhaps a trace of a smile in the second before he lets go. He slides faster than all the others. After all the others. Sorted out from all the others. Somehow he rolls his body with the centrifugal force, sensing its bends and using it to keep his feet pointed towards the edge so when he flies off the spinner he is already running fast, his body pitched forward like a sprinter and he runs through an opening in the crowd. The designer must have known there would be people like him, people who would try to hold onto the center. People who could feel the subtle twists within the science and the power of centrifugal force and sense what it can do, how it can move things apart or push them together so hard that you can’t hold on until the end of the ride. He must have known there are people who can keep their feet pointed outward and hold on until they are all alone and, only then, choose to let go.
JJG
Expectant dads and moms usually have months in which to mentally prepare and collect endless pearls of child-rearing wisdom from well-meaning friends and relatives. I had forty-eight hours.
For two years my wife and I had repeatedly played the fertility lotto, and lost, trying increasingly ingenious and unromantic ways to accomplish what seemed to happen so easily for others. One morning, after another such failure, we ran into our family doctor and exchanged a muzzy-headed word or two. So focused on the latest disappointment we hardly acknowledged that he offered to place us on an adoption list. We promptly forgot that conversation and shortly became immersed in another fascinating cycle of intrusive science experiments in the mysterious laboratory that used to be my wife. If you had trouble dissecting frogs in school, advanced fertility is not for you.
On a Monday night the phone rang. It was the doctor and he said he had our baby. Our baby? I had never even been in the pink and blue aisle in Wal-Mart and suddenly I had a baby. Wednesday at noon the nurse placed my daughter in my arms for the first time. We were so unprepared—my daughter spent her first evening in her new home perched on the table between boxes of stir fry and the sum gum. I was tempted to call her Takeout.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that all free and friendly child-rearing advice is worth exactly what you paid for it. Every child is different and figuring out what works for you is a matter of trial and error. Mainly error. A case in point: experts almost unanimously recommend timeouts to correct the recalcitrant child. Timeout is a mainstay in the arsenal of parental discipline.
When my daughter was around three years old she experienced a full category three meltdown, pummeling me in the chest with her tiny elfin feet as I hoisted her up and marched toward her room. When I placed her on the bed and turned to leave, she went from a category three to a five, and the tone of her voice, something to which all parents are finely attuned, had changed from frustration to terror. Twice I quietly explained I would return to check on her after a five minute timeout and attempted to leave. Her wails began to eclipse the town’s fire sirens. Timeout wasn’t working. Her childhood emotions were so completely overwhelming—a full body immersion in feelings she could neither understand nor control—that leaving her alone with them was as frightening as being left to drown. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shaking little body. I assured her I would stay until she calmed herself. Within minutes she stopped crying and never had a tantrum again.
Almost all parents at one time or another near a breaking point when that sweet little bundle turned Tasmanian devil really tests our emotional limits. When that happens, step back and take a breath or two. Remember it’s not personal and it’s not about you. If you’re stressed, give yourself that timeout. It’s better for both of you.
Be warned that I’m not your typical dad so that my take on being a father is about as useful as those free offers you get in the mail. Results may vary. I’m a home school dad who put my career on hold to raise my daughter. I started out as just a stay-at-home dad trying to figure out what to do with a baby when she wasn’t napping. Plunking her in front of the television for hours to watch a purple dinosaur made me want to go extinct.
We read books, cut out shapes, learned animals and the alphabet. By the time she went to preschool she had read a hundred books or so. I take no credit for that. She absorbed information like a sponge. All I did was expose her to it. When the time came to enroll in school she didn’t make the cutoff date for her age, so I had to decide whether to make her repeat kindergarten and first grade or continue on our own. Almost seven years later my daughter entered public school and still does things her own unique way.
Being a dad is doing things you never imagined doing and discovering newness in an ordinary world, and I don’t just mean finding the broccoli you thought she ate hidden in your jacket pocket. There are no definitive one-size-fits-all answers to crucial parenting questions like how many Webkinz can be safely stuffed in a backpack. Last time I dared to peek in my daughter’s room her bed was stacked with more wildlife than the Amazon rainforest. So, I’m probably not qualified for advice about setting limits.
Every day may not have memorable moments, but each one is a treasure, like the first time I played dress up with my little girl. Sometimes you just have to break down some barriers and live a little. But, just ask yourself, would you take advice from a guy who answered the door in a tiara and a pink tutu? Right, neither would my mailman. Ah, the memories.
This is the story of my life. It is a very ordinary life, but lived through very extraordinary times. I am writing about it only to record it for my children; who I was and what I did and what I thought was important in life. If you are reading this and you become bored, which will undoubtedly occur sooner for some than for others, put it down and don’t read further. The only remarkable thing about my life was that it occurred in a period that Tom Brokaw refers to as the “Greatest Generation.” This generation was composed of ordinary people leading ordinary lives under extraordinary conditions. Life was tough back then, but not insurmountable, and this is the story about how one family surmounted it.
These memoirs were precipitated by my son, Jeffrey. One day he said “Dad, you have all these stories you have told us about when you were a boy. Wouldn’t it be a good idea for you to write them down?” Little did he realize how much the kernel of his idea would proliferate.
I have selected incidents to write about from memory. I think I have treated the subjects honestly. If anyone was treated unfairly I apologize; that was not my intention.
I am most deeply indebted to the forbearance and understanding of my dear wife who permitted me to abandon husbandly duties over an extended period and toil relentlessly with an uncooperative word processor that I still do not know how to use. Secondly, this document would not exist in its present form without the inspiration and hard work of my son who was my editor-in-chief. Whatever you find good in this document must be his work; for that which is poorly worded or just plain wrong, I take full responsibility.
I thank my granddaughter, Megan, for permission to include her award-winning summary of the life of Colonel Joseph Christmas Ives. I also thank my bother, Ed, who permitted me to include his riveting account of his exploits in the jungles of New Guinea during World War II. Lastly, I am indebted to all the people mentioned in this work for being part of my life and providing me with their time, guidance and material to fill the rich fabric of my life.
John F. Gibbons
My mother and father were discussing how to divide their possessions among their children and asked me if there was anything specific I wanted. Somehow the unsettling talk of heirs and assets led me to think of these wonderful but perishable tales. I confess to asking my father to write down some of the colorful stories of his childhood. However, all credit for their arrival in print is due to the perseverance of my father. I merely pointed out that there was a tree in his yard which, with only a bit of water and judicious pruning, could produce wonderful fruit.
My father’s tales of growing up in Pittsburgh are a remarkably clear and detailed series of vignettes tinged with the humor and sadness of a resilient young man in a difficult time. They make no claim on history other than having been a small part of it. To my generation, they serve not only as a window into a former era, but as a reminder of the great debt we owe to his generation for the peace and prosperity we enjoy today. While enduring the suffering of the Great Depression and sacrifices of World War II the men and women of his generation maintained an optimism and faith in their country and in their children.
Here is the fruit of that tree, his tree. It is a generous father’s gift and a parable of childhood that encourages us to look for answers to our prayers not in what we wish but in what we become.
Jeffrey Gibbons
April 20, 2000
August 27th
The children call me Señor Agua. I tell them they are my little flowers and they must come to class every day so I can water them to help them grow tall and strong, but that is not entirely true. They would grow even without me. It is they who keep me strong and give me hope.
I am writing this at my old oak desk although it is only mine in the sense that the villagers let me use it to store my papers and lessons. Its spacious top is a constant reminder of their openness and generosity. Except that it is oak, it could have been my father’s and perhaps that familiarity calms my heart and focuses my thoughts in the morning sun. In the yellow shadowed light I admire its honestly earned dings and cracks, the creaky and often sticky drawers, as much as I love the people of this village, this country. It reminds me of my home, of imperfections. How these poor folks acquired a huge desk and hauled it to a remote village I do not know, but it probably was brought here by someone from my country in the early days when you could still take possessions with you. When I leave I cannot take it with me. I know that. But someday I will have to go away. It is only a matter of time until someone will speak of the American teacher while visiting the city and arouse official curiosity, and that will be all. I will have to be gone because I cannot bear to visit that world upon the lives of these innocent people.
I did not always want to be a teacher but teaching comes to me as naturally as flight to a bird. My childhood dreams contained drama and adventure, great discoveries and inventions. School was simply the vehicle that would propel me to greater heights. I never pictured myself returning to academia on the other side of the desk. Teachers were old and boring and dressed poorly. Encountering one of my teachers outside of school was as strange as finding a trout flopping down the middle of the boulevard. To most of us, teachers were as much a part of the school building as the desks and chalk boards. We felt our daily arrival breathed life into them and when the final bell rang, they lay about their rooms like half deflated globes until the next day.
I have to begin with an apology for the nature of what follows for it is only now that I have time to write again and am able to sort through the events and people that brought me here. If it were a string of beads the thread has snapped and I am sure that many have gone missing. At this point this cannot be called a book and it is certainly not a diary though it may resemble one. Now I wish that I had kept one. It is not so much a memoir as a series of recollections. I hope that you will forgive if I forget important people or jumble the order of things. I am not sure I can even remember how it all began, when the world began to tilt. Even though we all perceive things differently it is important to record what we can of our history however flawed by the retelling and not allow it to simply be erased. History created at such terrible cost should not be lost. This tale has heroes and villains alike, but mostly people filled with noble ideas and intentions who were both. After all, what separates a misguided hero from a villain? For each person who gained something, countless others lost everything, at least everything that means anything. Yet, if someone tells me they have lost everything I say “You still have your life. Is that nothing?” It is for them I am writing this. Perhaps it is for me as a way to make sense of these last few years and preserve a belief that my life was not for nothing.
Well, I must take this up later as I hear the chirping voices of my brightly colored little flowers arriving to breathe life into their old deflated teacher. At last.
Sleep did not come easily. I went to bed at midnight and awoke around three. After lying awake for a couple hours I decided to work on my note to her. Just after sunrise I drove the empty streets to her house to slip the note in the door. His son’s green Chevy was parked in the driveway. I could not tell if anyone was awake inside but I could see lights in the window. It was a hard night for them, too.
For a long time I stood at the end of the driveway looking across the street into the woods beyond. This time of year the trees are bare so the interstate was clearly visible a few hundred yards beyond the woods, on the far side of a creek. A narrow grassy strip led through the low bramble into the open wood. A light mist rose from the creek and fingered between the trees. There were no leaves to soften the crooked shadows or dampen the constant rush of highway traffic. The forest floor still wet from the night’s rain muffled my footsteps. On a sandbar in the creek bed stood the ruined foundation of a house and a lone green picnic table, its painting scaling off. A fallen birch provided the only access to the strange little island.
As I crested the bank above the creek a sudden puff of warm air struck my face, filled with the rich smell of dampness and decay. I stopped in midstep, but it was gone. I found myself looking around to see where it came from. The air stilled and cooled. The only sounds were the chatter of birds and the constant whoosh of cars and
trucks heading east and west.
I thought for a moment that if he had only waited to see this exquisite dawn he would have changed his mind.
I did not ask her to show me the tree where he chose to die but she had described it to me. Before he arrived home he had made the decision. He had known she was coming home soon so he had wasted no time only pausing briefly in the kitchen to leave his wallet, watch, keys and a short note which simply read “I’m sorry.”
He would have chosen a large tree so the bullet would not be a danger to anyone else. He would not have bothered to go far from the path but steered away from usual direction of his walks with her in the hope that she would not be the one to find him. With the noise of the highway to cover the shot he did not have to walk far. He would have faced the creek if he could, but not on the slope so his body would not tumble down into the
mud. A few yards downstream I spied a large oak. I did not see any blood and felt twinge of gratitude for the rainfall. I dug a hole at the base with a stick and dropped in a shining medal from my pocket, still warm with the memory of that lucky day when I was the one who made the fewest mistakes. I filled the hole with black dirt and smooth river stones. I had thought this moment would be difficult but I felt surprisingly peaceful. The things I had thought of saying did not seem necessary. Besides, I knew he was gone and I was alone. I had done what I came to do.
The sky was beginning to pale above the branches and the mist had burned off. I took a last look around at the empty wood, so close to filling with the green of springtime. It was time to go home to my family.
Fifteen thousand years ago, the retreating glaciers clawed a south pointing thumb into the shale of eastern Pennsylvania providing a jagged course for the Delaware River through the Water Gap and beyond. If the Dutch and Germans who settled here had not been refugees from generations of desperate slavery and starvation, they may have simply kept moving west rather than trying to coax crops from its rocky soil. Abandoned stone fence rows in the new growth forests stand in cold testament to the labor required to clear even a single field for planting. Then again, maybe those settlers stopped here because travel was difficult and perilous without highways. America still had frontiers. This was a frontier which became a gateway to the frontier. Now, it’s another highway turnstile called the burgs.
The burgs was the kind of place where people lived generation after unquestioning generation, at least until interstate highways began to rope themselves across America, slicing apart and erasing places like the burgs. Pre-interstate maps showed only a few spidery threads behind the colorful names of local hills and streams, a land alive with uniqueness and character. As the interstates expanded, local landmarks began to fade behind a dull background of pastels divided by bold red, blue, green and yellow lines. One of those lines coiled itself around three sides of the burgs. The only remaining opening faces north.
Both highways and drug dealers promise escape to a better life. Highways represent energetic commerce and easy travel, but at the price of cultural decline and economic stagnation as better paying jobs lure away the best and brightest. At first, newcomers saw the region’s culture as quaint, even somewhat appealing, but eventually the local younger generation was shamed by their sophisticated new friends into abandoning customs. The burgs lost their innocence to false dream and now lie as weathered addicts, backs pressed against the stony hills, dependent on the thing that is sucking out their lives.
In this land, I am a newcomer, untethered by family or history, here by circumstance not choice. I am often asked by lifers–those who have lived here all their lives or for generations–if I like it here. I say that everywhere I have lived I found things I like to do and people with whom I like to spend time. Otherwise I would be a miserable person. I think the deeper question they want to ask is if they have made the right choice by spending a lifetime in one place. That question I cannot answer. I cannot say what is right or good for them. Moving always exacts steep price, lost relationships and unrealized opportunities. I sometimes wonder what my life might have been had I grown from child to adulthood in the same town. In many ways I admire the continuity in their lives and the core of knowledge and friendships that grows from deep roots in a community. I don’t have that. Friends have faded in the distance or simply vanished over the years and there is no single place I think of as home. The places I have lived in the past hold no particular attraction for me as they are now without the friends who once make them special, or tolerable.
It was hot. The humidity rose in a thick curtain from the field between the stone rows. The wedding guests shifted restlessly trying to unstick themselves from their white plastic folding chairs and gazed enviously at the single oak tree that dappled the wedding party with a bit of shade. The guests soft pine path had claimed a few high heeled shoes which were now kicked beneath the seats. One grandmother had to be carried down like a flower sack after her walker lodged under a pine root. Bridesmaids struggled to resist using their bouquets to swat at the gnats and mosquitoes clouded around the bridesmaids’ bare shoulders.
The nearby fire pond lay parched and cracked by a dry summer, but mosquitoes don’t need much, and what the pond lacked in water, it made up for in mud and thick green algae.
The guests fidgeted and leaned forward, straining to hear the vows over the steady murmur of wind in the trees and the nearby brook. The bride and groom had mimed their way through the welcome ceremony when the first dog appeared. There were two. Large Labradors, named Beetle and Juice, originally brown and black, but it was hard to tell because they had discovered the fire pond. The groom’s soon to be ex-best friend had thought it was a good idea to bring his dogs to share in the celebration. A wedding in a field at a farm is, after all, a perfect place for dogs.
Beetle’s first pass was a perfect strafing run down the front row of guests. About a hundred pounds of dog and fifty pounds of splattering mud and slime. People leaped to their feet in an undulating horrified wave as he passed spraying muck. There were shouts, screams, chairs flying. Juice followed hot on his heels mopping up anybody that Beetle might have missed. Excited by the commotion, Beetle cut a quick circle for a second pass. One stone faced woman glared at Beetle, planted her feet, and drew back a her cane to give him a good whack, but she put a little too much effort on the backswing, lost her footing and went over in a flurry of kicking feet.
Juice, right on Beetle’s heels and not wanting to miss the fun, jigged right to avoid a tossed high heel shoe and slammed straight into bridesmaid number one. Juice was the smaller dog, but 80 pounds of exuberant canine at flanking speed will flat take you off your feet. Especially if your four inch heels are stuck like tent stakes into the dirt. Bridesmaid number one was airborn and shoeless when she smacked into bridesmaid number two, and they went down like dominoes. The groom snatched his gaping bride aside just in time, like a true hero, right into the minister who was trying to occupy that same space. The table went over, rings, wine glasses and all. It took a full half hour to find the rings.
The bride’s father headed up the path stiff-legged and head down probably going for the Mossberg 12 gauge in his trunk. The genius who brought the dogs disappeared through a barbed wire fence because as any dog owner knows, they will give you up.
